Now the Nazis. The guard says: You are a Jew. It says right here in this Nazi handbook that all Jews are filth, vermin, parasites. You say you are a human being? That you suffer pain? Nonsense! It says right here in my Nazi handbook that you are not human at all! What does the guard feel in his heart as he strikes a Jew? Pity? Empathy? Is he thinking: how would I like to be on the other end of this stick? No.

Gevorah does not dictate what you believe, only that you will be blind in the belief of it.

And what else are the guards? Are they completely like Rabbi Donel? No. Rabbi Donel is gevorah/chochmah. There is no chochmah here—no intuition, no sense of G-d, no sense of the whole. There is efficiency, there is automation, there is clinical, detached hierarchy—in other words, pure binah.

The Fascists are gevorah/binah/netzach: judgment, logic, domination. They have a desire to annihilate anyone who does not fit their perfect schematic, whose very existence threatens their logical criteria of a perfect world.

How did an entire nation become gevorah/binah/netzach? Become snakes? Where is the other sweep of the pendulum? Where is the good that balances the evil?

Where is G-d?

I have written out all of my equations neatly and carefully on two pages. These equations are my life’s work. They must survive if nothing else does. I have asked Anatoli to use his safest container and his safest hiding place for them. Please, Lord, may the Nazis not destroy this also!

Jill was in the middle of a lecture when Nate burst through the door at the back of the hall. The look on his face made the words disintegrate in her mouth like salted slugs. She dimly finished up what she’d been saying and dismissed class early.

“What is it?” she asked, following him down the hall.

“You’ll have to see for yourself.” Nate’s tone said he wouldn’t know where to begin.

They passed Dr. Grover, who must have smelled something was up. He made a U-turn and attached himself to Jill’s heels. “Morning, Jill. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

She slowed down her gait, pushed back her hair. “Chuck.”

“I never heard how your data panned out.” Grover glanced sharp-eyed at Nate, who had paused a few paces down the hall and was waiting for her with all the subtlety of a child at the door of a candy shop.

“Um, we haven’t completed our analysis.”

Nate moved on, turning into the corridor to her office. Jill went after him and, to her horror, Grover came after her. By a flash of luck their department head, Dick Chalmers, was passing by. His face lit up with a Grinch-like smile at the sight of his star professor. He pulled Grover into a conversation, allowing Jill to slip away.

“What is it?” she asked Nate when they were safely locked in her office.

He was breathing hard. It took him a moment to get the words out.

“I finished that program we talked about. It was a lot simpler than I thought. All I did was take the data we got by running your equation on Quey, subtract the real-life carbon atom data from CERN, and map the difference onto a wave pattern.”

Jill had already moved to his computer. A screen saver had come up while he’d gone to fetch her. All she had to do was move the mouse to get it to go away, but she didn’t. Her fingers twisted together at her waist.

“I assume there was an interesting result or you wouldn’t look like that.”

Nate pointed toward the computer as if it were a ghost. “Go ahead.”

“It’s on the screen? Now?”

Nate nodded dumbly.

Jill reached toward the computer. Her hand paused in mid-air, almost afraid to end the suspense. “Should I… Should I get the camera?”

He shrugged, wide-eyed. Don’t ask me.

She was being a ninny. She took a deep breath and pushed the mouse.

On the screen was a moving wave pattern. It was pulsing like a heart monitor—running steadily over and over and over. It was unlike any wave she had ever seen. It was not gently rolling crests and troughs of varying heights, like a normal sine wave. Instead, it was a blunt, castellated pattern, the crests and troughs formed by absolutely perpendicular lines in a perfectly even, repeating up-and-down pattern, crest–trough–crest–trough.

“Is this a joke?” Jill asked weakly, sinking into Nate’s chair.

“Um, no.” He squatted beside her and stared at the wave.

“Well, what exactly is producing it?”

“Just what I said. That wave is the difference between what your equation predicted the particles of the carbon atom would do and what the particles actually did. I caused it to loop so we could see it in motion, but that’s all I did to it.”

Jill felt her skin turn cold as the blood drained south. It had to be a joke, but a sidelong glance at Nate’s face confirmed that a cheap jolly was the last thing on his mind.

“But… but… that’s not possible.”

He waved a hand at the screen as if to say, Don’t blame me. Damn thing just showed up.

“Could it be some kind of data fluke?”

“How? The math is producing that wave, nothing else. And it’s perfect. I mean, look at that. You can’t just pull random numbers out of the air and make something like that. Whatever it is… ,” Nate swallowed, “it was in the particle accelerator with that atom.”

Jill was light-headed. She might just slip out of the chair. She felt as though her reality had shifted.

No, not just my reality. Maybe everyone’s reality.

Was she misrepresenting it? Overdramatizing? She tried to grasp the concept that was being displayed on the monitor. What did it mean?

It means that:

How huge was that?

“Dr. Talcott?”

She must have gone somewhere, because Nate was looking at her with concern. He had a hand on her shoulder. She moved away from his touch instinctively. She wished she could be alone to truly savor this moment, really let herself go, do a few leaps in the air with glee. Instead, she heard herself speak briskly from very, very far away.

“We’ll have to double-check it. Go over and over the data.”

She went to the video camera and turned it on. She gave a brief rundown of the situation, sounding nearly rational, and focused the camera on the computer. The wave was duly recorded. As Jill spoke about it she paused, blanking out.

“I… guess we should name it.”

Nate made a face, like he couldn’t believe this was happening. He peered at the screen.